Jakkai Siributr’s Textile Weaves Together Socio-Political Histories
Installation view of Jakkai Siributr’s work at Art Basel Hong Kong, 2023. Courtesy of Flowers Gallery.
Thai artist Jakkai Siributr evokes the communal dimension of traditional textiles commonly found in artisanal shops and households across Southeastern Asia for poignantly political interventions into artificial constructs of borders and nation-states. The radical history of textiles as a symbolic and democratic language that connects generations and peoples, independent from any mandated or state-sponsored narrative, becomes a potent site of generatively reimagining co-existence in the present time for the artist, whose future-oriented practice critically examines the geopolitics and the changing landscape of Thailand and surrounding territories. For Siributr’s first institutional survey in the United Kingdom, There’s no Place at Whitworth Art Gallery, the artist weaves national and personal histories together and explores textile-making as a relational practice. Leading up to the artist’s upcoming solo exhibition at Flowers Gallery, Qingyuan Deng speaks with the artist on recent and future projects.
Qingyuan Deng: You work with communities of refugees on the Thai-Myanmar border and in the US through embroidery workshops. How did you form the idea initially, and how do you grapple with displacement?
Jakkai Siributr: Prior to working with the stateless Shan communities on the Thai-Myanmar border, I have been conducting storytelling workshops with many marginalized communities, such as Muslim women in the Pattani province of Thailand and refugee children, including those from Myanmar whose families have settled in the USA, among others. For these workshops, I invite participants to tell their stories visually via drawings and embroidery. For many children who have experienced trauma, it is easier to share their stories through visual elements than words. I conducted a similar workshop at the Koung Jor Shan refugee camp in 2019 and came to learn of their stateless situations—before then, I did not realize there is a large number of stateless population in Thailand.
Jakkai Siributr, HC20, 2023. Deconstructed uniforms, talismanic objects, beads, chains and threads. 153 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Flowers Gallery.
QD: I really enjoyed your works for The Spirits of Maritime Crossing presented by the Bangkok Art Biennale. Do you want to talk about the idea of healing from traumas of displacement in your textiles?
JS: I have experienced firsthand the healing power of embroidery from working on my art, especially on projects relating to my mother after she passed away. Doing embroidery on my mother’s clothes gave me comfort while dealing with my own grief. That’s why I wanted to introduce embroidery to various marginalized communities who have experienced traumas of displacement, in the hope that they too will discover embroidery’s healing power.
QD: For the Whitworth show, you are working with the idea of the personal is the political. Can you talk more about how you weave Thai symbolism and familial language?
JS: The Whitworth show includes three works from my 2023 matrilineal exhibition. These works celebrate the extraordinary lives of the women in my life—my mother, her three sisters, and my grandmother. They were separated right before the Second World War and reunited twelve years later after the war ended. They lived through one of the most tumultuous times in Thailand’s modern history, some of which impacted their lives directly—the abdication of one king, the sudden and unexpected death of another, the student uprising of 1973 and 1976. Some of these incidents still remain taboo to discuss openly. But since I grew up seeing how many of these lives greatly suffered because of it, it has become my own story, too. Addressing this in my work is a way for me to come to terms with these tragic incidents. Thailand is a nation where history often gets rewritten and sometimes completely erased. It is even more crucial to repeatedly tell these stories to the next generation.
QD: Lastly, I want to mention the global nature of There’s no Place. How will the workshop be different from your past social engagement projects?
JS: The call-and-response workshop for There’s no Place offers an opportunity to create cross-cultural dialogues with the stateless Shan communities. By adding embroidery onto the same fabric that had previously been touched and embroidered by Shan youths, participants are asked to bear witness to human sufferings and experiences of displacement, to reflect upon and acknowledge such protracted refugee situations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jakkai Siributr’s solo exhibition will be on view at Flowers Gallery, London, from January 9th to February 8th, 2025.
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